


Writ In Water

by copperbadge



Series: Writer In A Drawer 2009 [6]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Time Travel, messing with causality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-30
Updated: 2009-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-22 13:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/pseuds/copperbadge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Time isn't an archive, with neat little files and labels. It's just this...heap of things that happened. You pull something off the bottom, you knock some things over. That's why we live with our messes."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Writ In Water

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the final round of writerinadrawer. Thanks to Foxy for beta sparkles. 
> 
> Theme: Getting clean; added element, a board game.  
> Word Count: Less than 4500  
> Score: 1 (+12, -11). Won the round and, thus, the game. 
> 
> Warnings: Technically involves a suicide.

_Here lies one whose name was writ in water._  
\-- Gravestone epitaph of John Keats

"Hnefatafl," Tosh said.

"Gesundheit," Ianto replied, without looking up from the muddy objects before him. He heard Tosh chuckle as she sat down across from him at his worktable.

"It's what you and Owen recovered this morning," she said, indicating the little carvings. "Hnefatafl. It's an old Norse game, like chess."

"Norse or not, it reeks of bog," Ianto replied.

"You should be careful," Tosh advised, offering him a figurine from her pocket. He took it and set it aside in the "clean" box. "I tested that one. The residual Rift energy is off the scale. They might age you before your time," she teased.

"Torchwood's already working on that," Ianto remarked.

"You're grumpy," Tosh said, as she slid off the stool. "I'll leave you to it."

"I smell of bog too!" Ianto called after her.

"You'll get used to it!" she called back. Ianto smiled and bent to his cleaning again.

The thick, erratically-checked wooden board they'd pulled out of the wetlands west of Cardiff was slowly drying nearby, pressed flat under a towel and a load of old pig-iron weights. Ianto, meanwhile, was dealing with the game pieces: small bearded blokes in pointy helmets, some with spears, all showing a hand-carved individuality. Likely, according to Tosh -- he consulted the report she'd left -- from the 11th to 12th century, before they fell through the Rift.

Not terribly interesting, except as a historical object, and his mind drifted as he cleaned the figurines. He thought about the work he still had to complete after this, the voicemail from Rhiannon that he should return but wouldn't, and the dinner he and Jack had planned that morning. Jack had wanted to know if he preferred Indian or Greek; he'd replied that he might want real old-fashioned Welsh food, root vegetables and seaweed, which had made Jack laugh.

He set a newly cleaned figurine down on the board and felt something trickle through his fingers, wet and gritty -- but when he lifted his hand to study them, they were dry. Weird. Still, they handled high levels of Rift residue all the time. However wary Gwen might profess to be, none of them had ever shown signs of being ill from it.

Although, on consideration, perhaps gloves were in order while he cleaned.

He was about to go find some when the Rift alarm went, and after that crisis was averted there was feeding time for the Weevils and Myfanwy,  
and then Jack insisted that he leave the rest of the work until morning so he could have a feeding time himself. That night the Rift went balls-out insane, and for two days the half-cleaned Hnefatafl game lay uncared-for on the worktable.

When he finally had a moment to catch up, he found that the game board had dried out flat and relatively unblemished. He set it on the worktable and, on a whim, placed the clean pieces randomly around it. There weren't enough to fill the checks on the board, though he knew they'd collected every piece the Rift had dropped. Perhaps some hadn't made it through --

He hesitated as he set the last piece down. He was sure there had been nine in total, but now there were ten on the board. He picked up the piece he'd just placed, and another piece disappeared.

Ianto put it down again, then snaked his other hand out (as if an inanimate object was going to run away) and captured the disappearing piece when it reappeared.

When he touched the little figure, darkness and heat enveloped him, steam-humid, and the thick dull noise of engines rang in his ears. He found himself no longer in the Hub's quiet sub-levels but in some kind of boiler room, filled with pressure valves and the tang of engine oil...

And Jack. Strung up in chains between two pylons, head hanging low, hair greasy and clothing stained and ripped. He was alone, slump-shouldered in the kind of defeat that Ianto wasn't aware Jack even knew existed.

He stepped forward and his shoe creaked on the metal grating. Jack's head snapped up, eyes searching, hyper-vigilant. When he saw Ianto, he laughed.

"Of all the hallucinations in all the spaceships in all the world, you had to walk into mine," he said, and laughed again, and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. " _I see dead people._ "

Ianto felt the Hnefatafl piece fall from suddenly numb fingers. As it clattered to the floor, the heat and noise vanished. He found himself standing once more at the work table, with nine game pieces on the board in front of him.

***

He would have gone to Tosh with it, but he wasn't sure it wasn't a hallucination. He could have asked Owen to find out, but Owen was an unsympathetic ear at the best of times. Gwen would have told Jack, and he couldn't tell Jack. Jack was proud, and the despairing bow-shouldered man in that engine room had been a mockery of his Captain.

Besides, Jack saying he was dead, whether it was in the future or some alternate reality, was...well...creepy.

The day after the encounter in the engine room, Ianto consulted Tosh's research and laid out the game pieces in proper configuration, two opposing armies in black and blond wood. Only the pale soldiers had a king; the goal of the dark soldiers was to keep the king from getting where he wanted to go. It was intricate and confusing, a half-memory of another time, re-created from old documents and oral history.

It was also, apparently, the Rift's idea of a twisted logic puzzle. Sometimes he could put a figure in place on the board and another would appear. If he moved that new piece, two more might appear -- or two existing pieces would disappear. He fiddled with it for ages, but there were never quite enough to fill the board, and there was one piece still forever absent -- left with Jack in that engine room of torment, he assumed.

"Ianto!" Jack's voice, booming across the Hub, distracted him from a new piece in the logic puzzle (one dark soldier that made two pale ones appear). Jack was bounding towards him, all shiny smile and good hair. "Everyone's gone. Whatcha up to?"

"Finishing documentation on a recovery," Ianto replied, stifling the urge to sweep the board and pieces into a nearby carton and lock them away.

"Finish later," Jack ordered, sliding an arm around Ianto's waist from behind, nosing against the back of his neck.

"You _are_ the boss," Ianto replied, relaxing into the embrace.

"Yes, I am," Jack said in his ear. "Ten minutes. Boardroom."

The boardroom. They hadn't really...explored the boardroom fully. So many inopportune windows. Or opportune, depending on your point of view.

"Yes, sir," Ianto agreed, and Jack released him, running up the spiral staircase on some other mission. Possibly he was whistling. Ianto smiled. One of the good days, then.

Without thinking about it, he reached out to toy with one of the game pieces. He twisted his fingers around the figurine's helmet, picked it up...

...and found himself standing in knee-high grass, under a grey morning sky. It'd been late evening, last he checked.

Another hallucination, or another journey. He looked down at the figure in his hand. He could drop it, and go back to the Hub and Jack, but perhaps there was a Jack here, too, and he was as curious as anyone about Jack's secrets.

There was a road nearby, at the bottom of the hill where he stood, and he headed in that direction. After all, it was a sunny, peaceful day, and how much could go --

He heard a shout in the distance and scanned the ridge of the hill. Three figures were visible against the sky, one running ahead of the others, arms windmilling as he barreled down towards the road. Another runner, just behind him, stumbled and fell. The third vaulted over his fallen comrade and continued to give chase -- it must be a chase, given the desperation on the face of the young man drawing close to Ianto and the road.

The second pursuer tripped and fell as well, and Ianto had only a moment to register that their intended victim's face was familiar before the man ran past him, onto the road.

More than familiar, actually, and Ianto realised who he was even as he moved to shove the man aside, tumbling with him to the tarmac to prevent a bright red convertible from plowing them both down. As they landed, he could feel the figurine shake free of his grasp, and the last thing he saw before he returned to the Hub was the startled, very much alive face of Eugene Jones.

Nothing _seemed_ different, once he'd got his bearings again, except that he was missing another game piece. Perhaps it really was a hallucination -- or perhaps he'd just avoided treading on the metaphorical butterfly.

Jack hadn't even noticed his absence, though it wasn't as though he'd been gone for long. Besides, Jack had other things on his mind.

"You're distracted," Jack said, fingers digging into Ianto's hips as he pressed him down into a boardroom chair. "Something on your mind? Nervous about the windows?"

Ianto met Jack's bright blue eyes, felt the skin of Jack's chest under his fingers. Warm, lovely skin. He smiled.

"Nothing that can't wait," he said, and turned all his attention to the Captain.

***

"Gwen!" Ianto called the next morning, catching up to her on the Plass. He passed her a coffee from the carrier in his hand. "Good morning."

"Morning, Ianto," she said, beaming at him. "Special treat?"

"Balming a guilty conscience," he replied.

"What'd you do?" she asked.

"More what I haven't done. Can I ask -- do you remember..."

He trailed off as Gwen opened the door to the Information Centre, because suddenly the question seemed stupid.

"Remember what?" Gwen asked.

"Nothing. Forgot what I was going to ask," he said. "Morning, Eugene."

"Morning, Ianto!" Eugene said cheerfully, emerging from the back room, weighed down by a large pile of files. He stopped suddenly, horrified. "Oh! God! I forgot the -- with the -- Ianto, sorry! I'll get that as soon as I...well, it'll take some time, but -- "

Ianto watched, trying not to betray his shock, as Eugene kept babbling about things he'd forgot to do and swore he would get done and had to do right now but he could do the other thing later and --

"Put him out of our misery," Owen groaned, pushing past Ianto into the Information Centre. Eugene lapsed into silence, looking sheepish.

"Get on with your work," Ianto managed -- not unkindly, he thought. "Check in when you're done."

"Thanks!" Eugene called after him, as Ianto followed Gwen and Owen down the corridor beyond the secret door.

"He's never going to get over you mysteriously saving his life, is he?" Gwen asked, snickering.

Ianto resolved that he was definitely going to tell Jack about this. Right after he did some documentation of the phenomenon. A proper documentation this time, with film and a Rift activity monitor and a written report.

Although...it had been a good thing, hadn't it? Poor Eugene should never have died, and he seemed genuinely useful. It wasn't interfering in history, just tidying it up. Ianto pictured himself with a rag and a spray-bottle, wandering through the past, scrubbing out little  
stains here and there. It amused him. 

Except that if he did try again, with all the monitors and equipment and records, he'd have to tell Jack, and all that potential would disappear. So maybe he shouldn't record anything just yet.

He waited until the others had gone to lunch, promising he'd join them at the cafe as soon as he finished a report. As soon as they were gone he set out the board, shuffling the pieces around, shoving them into squares at random. It was like the board was half-stuck in the Rift, struggling in its own non-sentient way to get out. That made sense; if a figurine from it existed only half-in reality, it could pull someone anywhere through the Rift.

Which was dangerous, of course, he knew that, but he'd come through unscathed once, and Eugene's presence didn't seem to be destroying the universe. So...perhaps just one more try.

A new piece appeared, then, one he hadn't seen before, with a chipped helmet showing a knotty burl in the woodgrain. Ianto rested his fingers on it, sliding them down to the base, and then casually picked it up.

Sunlight glared in his eyes. He could hear a siren in the distance, but before him was the serene spread of the Plass. The fountain with its usual waterfall, the opera house, the --

The bright blue police box sitting directly atop the invisible lift.

Ianto raised his head and sniffed and caught a familiar smell: the scent of destruction, smoke and charred metal. From here he could see the half-destroyed remains of an apartment block that Abbadon had trod on, months ago now; it had only survived a week before a wrecking crew tore it down. Cardiff had a long history and a very short memory.

Which meant this was only a few days past the raising of Abbadon, and below his feet --

No. Behind him. Behind him was Jack, running across the Plass. Making for the blue box, and oh, this was it. This was the moment Jack left them. This was the single act that flung Jack into some dark place, the reason Ianto had to take Jack's good days where he could and watch helplessly during the bad ones.

Of its own accord, his arm shot out and caught Jack's shoulder. Jack whipped around, momentum carrying them both into a mutual orbit, but Ianto got his other hand on him as well and yanked hard. Jack nearly came off his feet, his headlong flight for the police box thwarted.

"IANTO," Jack shouted, jerking away. "What the fuck -- "

Too late. Jack was turning to the blue box, but it was gone.

"That was -- " Jack looked despairing, so hopeless that for a moment Ianto regretted the instinct. But only for a moment. "Why would you do that? _Do you know what you've done?_ "

"Better than you do," Ianto said, holding up the game piece between two fingers. He dropped it before Jack could speak again, and found himself back at the worktable.

He waited warily, unwilling to move too far until he knew what changes he'd wrought. It would be better, wouldn't it? It would have to be, without the bitterness of Jack's abandonment and Jack's own dark places after he'd returned.

"Made it back in one piece?" a voice said, and Ianto flinched, turning quickly. Jack stepped out of the shadows of the Hub. "Knew as soon as we found that thing it was going to be trouble."

"I was going to document it," Ianto tried.

"Sure, eventually," Jack said. His voice was hard, on the angry side of uncaring. "So, Ianto," he added, circling the table and resting his palms flat on it. "What kind of a world are you from?" 

Ianto gave him a blank look.

"You changed history," Jack said. "Your own personal history, which is stupid. But you're not stupid, so either this thing has you in some kind of thrall, or what happened to me when I left was -- "

"If you'd ever told me, maybe I'd know," Ianto interrupted with a snarl. "If you'd told me where you went I could have helped. All I knew was that for three months you'd hardly eat, for six months you've woken screaming half the time. So tell me, Jack, what sort of thing does that to you?"

Jack didn't back down. "Guess now we'll never know."

"Fine by me," Ianto retorted.

"You're not Ianto anymore," Jack said in a low voice. "You're his Ianto, not mine. So. Stay the hell away from me."

Ianto opened his mouth, but found he had nothing to say to that. Jack was already turning, walking away.

It took two days -- two days of not asking how Owen and Eugene had died, of being kept at arm's length by a calculating, bitter Jack -- before Ianto realised Jack hadn't confiscated the game board.

Why? He obviously thought it was dangerous. Why wouldn't he lock it up, or put it to his own uses?

He got his answer the next time the Rift flared. For a minute, just for him, reality split in half. Two different teams stood in the Hub, looking at the Rift alerts, sometimes passing near or even through each other. Ianto had barely time to register this before he realised there were two of him, too, both inside his head. He could feel other sensations, hear other thoughts, and his mind said _Oh, that's interesting,_ right before he passed out.

***

The second time the Rift flared up he was alone, and the stabbing pain of having two of himself in one head at one time made him stumble and retch.

The third time, he saw dark shadows and the flash of teeth.

The fourth time, Gwen saw something too, and wouldn't let it go until Jack agreed to study what was happening. Ianto chose to keep quiet, and Jack didn't call him on it.

"I think..." Tosh said, studying printouts and reports in the boardroom, "Well, I think two realities are crossing paths. It's like time is branching, but it can't sustain the branch, so it collapses. Maybe something artificially altering a timeline? Hard to say."

Ianto saw Jack staring at him, but when the others looked up, Jack turned his head away.

"Okay," Jack said. "Let's prep for Rift flares. Make sure we're all conscious of the fact that what we see is real, but not _our_ real. Gwen, work on contingency plans. Tosh, see if you can track back to when the whole thing started. I'm going to ask around at the hospitals, see if anyone's been admitted with symptoms that might match Rift-psychosis."

"I'll come with you," Ianto said.

"No," Jack said simply, and left the room.

"How long have you two been fighting?" Tosh asked, after the door shut behind Jack. "Honestly, whatever you did, say you're sorry."

"I don't think that's going to fix it," Ianto answered, turning to the window to watch Jack stalk across the Hub. "I was just trying to make  
our lives a little...cleaner. It didn't work so well." 

"Well, stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something," Gwen said. "I'm tired of Jack sulking."

Ianto shifted his gaze from Jack to the worktable where the Hnefatafl game sat. "I should," he said quietly.

He had to go back to the board. This was a mess, his mess, and he had to fix it. Still, he barely understood the game board to begin with, and he had no control over where it took him. What could he do?

He waited for a day and a half, while they all danced along the edge of a Rift that was beginning to crumble time itself. When he finally summoned the courage to face the game, he found Jack standing across from him, studying it as well.

"What is this, a lesson?" Ianto asked.

"What do you think?" Jack replied. "You want to travel in time, you learn the consequences. Time isn't an archive, with neat little files and labels. It's just this...heap of things that happened. You pull something off the bottom, you knock some things over. That's why we live with our messes."

"Some things don't wash away," Ianto said.

"Then hard luck," Jack answered. "You should know that already."

Ianto fell silent. After a minute, Jack turned from him to the board and began rearranging the pieces, slowly at first, then with increasing speed as the figurines began to appear and disappear. Ianto watched, awed, as Jack worked his way in forty seconds through something it had taken him days to figure out.

"Time travel," Jack said, as he worked, "is tricky. You have to have an understanding of fourth-dimensional mathematics, branched calculus -- which doesn't exist yet -- logic, scale, and spatial physics. And you have to be..." he lifted his hands off the board, "...naturally good at these things."

Ianto looked down. All the figures were there on the board, even the ones he'd dropped. He rested his hand on the pale king figure, but Jack gently lifted his wrist and placed it on one of the black figures at the edge of the board instead. Ianto closed his hand and lifted it up.

The smell hit him first, the musky, standing-water smell of bog. The sky was grey, glare making him squint, and the air was the usual cold damp of a Cardiff autumn.

Even so, this was not Cardiff, nor anywhere near it. A low haze to the east might be the city, but out here it was all wilderness.

Familiar, in fact, from a day spent scouring the wetlands for traces of an artifact that had fallen through the Rift. He and Owen had gone out to collect up whatever was there --

In the distance he thought he could see the SUV, a black blot on the road, speeding down the twists and turns of the road, Owen having egged Ianto into driving faster than was strictly necessary. If that was the Torchwood SUV, then somewhere in this area the game board was lying in a shallow puddle, and a handful of carved figurines were half-covered in the mud, waiting to be raked free. He had no time to find all the pieces and, even if he could, the Rift energy detectors would lead himself and Owen straight to him.

But the pieces and the game board were wood, and in the water would split and rot. Left alone, they wouldn't last long, and the temporal energy would dissipate back into the Rift itself.

He made a decision, and stepped into the road.

The SUV screamed to a halt when they saw him standing there; he watched, seeing it through his other eyes as well, as he and Owen climbed out of the car, guns drawn. He waited patiently for them to come close enough to speak. 

"Ianto?" Owen asked, but it wasn't him that Owen was asking.

"Don't know," the other Ianto replied.

"Oi!" Owen called. "Ianto Jones! You fall through the Rift?"

"Not exactly," Ianto said. The other men glanced at each other, questioning, and then the other Ianto holstered his gun. "I'm here to send you back."

"Back where?" the other Ianto asked.

"Back to the Hub."

"You from our future, then?" Owen asked. "Isn't this a paradox?"

Ianto paused. Was it? No -- he was stepping across dimensions, back to the place that had once been his home. As messy and difficult as it had been...it was better, perhaps, than where he was now. 

"Not a paradox," Ianto said. "But you need to leave here. The Rift's not safe in this place."

They were close enough to touch now, and his other self stared at him with wide, nervous eyes. Ianto reached out, knowing the fracture it would cause, knowing it would seal his own fate irrevocably. He took his counterpart's wrist and pressed the game piece into it, so that each of them held a portion.

The sky split open, and a dark-winged shadow burst through.

"Go or die," Ianto said, and released the game piece as his counterpart and Owen ran for the SUV. He looked up, spread his arms, and let the shadow take him.

***

"Fuck _me_ ," Owen said, as they flew down the road to Cardiff. "What the hell just happened?"

Ianto checked the rearview mirror again. As they ran for their lives he had seen just enough that he knew what he'd have nightmares about tonight, but he couldn't _not_ look as a shadow with broad batlike wings and sharp claws ripped his own body to shreds and vanished in a spray of blood.

"No clue," Ianto said, turning back and dropping the little figurine into an evidence bag Owen offered. "Warning, I suppose? See if Tosh has any new readings for that area. I'll call Jack and let him know what happened."

"Are you sure that's wise?" Owen asked, and Ianto hesitated over the _dial_ button. "You know. Time travel. Maybe you shouldn't know about it. Maybe Jack shouldn't."

Ianto glanced at Owen's face, which was deadly serious, and then back at the road, nodding. "Right. Tell them we couldn't find anything. Incinerate the...whatever-it-is."

"And you?"

"I'll just...keep this to myself."

"Suits me," Owen said, and dialed Tosh's number. "Tosh darling. Favour from you," he said into his headset, as he passed the figurine back to Ianto. "Nah, nah, didn't find anything. Check and see if there's been any more activity in the area? Ta..."

***

"You're distracted," Jack said, and Ianto felt a shiver of inexplicable deja-vu run up his spine. He looked up from his plate and summoned a smile, waiting until a server had refilled their water glasses before speaking.

"Not really," he said.

"Something happened on that recovery today," Jack said, but it was a guess -- he always narrowed his eyes when he was guessing.

"Just an empty field," Ianto lied. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure," Jack said, around a mouthful of chicken. Ianto tapped the corner of his mouth. Jack sheepishly wiped his own mouth with a napkin.

"When you...travelled," Ianto said, unwilling to put too much detail into where, when, or with whom, "Did you ever get the urge to...fix something?"

"Can't do that. Very first rule," Jack said seriously. "It never solves the problem. It just spreads the mess around."

"Oh," Ianto said softly.

"Why the sudden interest in... _travel_?" Jack asked.

"No reason," Ianto said -- then, impulsively, "Come back to mine tonight."

Jack nodded, but he looked confused. "Sure. Any particular reason?"

"Because I want you to."

"What's got into you?" Jack asked, smiling. Ianto shrugged.

"Moment of clarity," he said. "You never know how much time you have."

"True," Jack said, and then he reached out and touched Ianto's wrist gently. "Look, something else we learned -- some mysteries weren't meant to be solved. Whatever happened, let it go."

"It's not easy."

"It's not meant to be," Jack said, and then he grinned wide. "Come on. We'll distract ourselves tonight. You get the car. I'll take care of the bill."

END

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